ENGLAND’S ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

England’s Elizabethan Theatre developed rapidly during the trium­phant years following the defeat of the Spanish Armada. For some time, troupes of professional players had toured the country. There was also amateur performing of Moralities and knockabout folk-entertainment. The professional actor-managers-including Shakespeare-who eventually built and ran the London playhouses, still looked to the Court and impor­tant noblemen for their permits to perform, but they had to attract popular audiences. These wanted clowning and sword-combats, but had a genuine passion for quickness of wit and poetry spoken with fire and feeling.

The Elizabethan stage was admirably designed to please a quick-witted and imaginative audience. It consisted of a forestage, jutting into the audience, on which outdoor scenes were played; a curtained inner stage to suggest interiors; and an upper stage or balcony. Because there was no scenery to be changed, no curtain to be lowered, the dramatist could move freely and swiftly from place to place. Having only words at his command for description of time, place and atmosphere, the dramatist had to use his imagination and compelled his audience to use theirs. All had to be done by the poet and the actors (who, including the boys who played the women’s parts, were thoroughly trained and accomplished). As he deliv­ered one of the famous speeches (written as great solos for the voice, like an aria in opera) the actor on the forestage had an intimate relation with his audience, perhaps impossible to recapture on our picture-frame stage. We put the actor in another world, at which we stare through the frame of the proscenium arch; Elizabethan Theatre brought the actor into our world, creating dramatic experience of a kind never since achieved.

Having an extraordinary, rich nature, Shakespeare was divided and contradictory about many things. For instance, he believed in law and order and sober conduct and a sense of duty, but he could not help feeling some sympathy with rebellious and raffish characters, whether comic like Falstaff, or tragic like Antony and Cleopatra. But then he would not have been the supreme master of drama he was if he had not had this astonishing breadth of sympathy, creating contradictions in his mind.

Other dramatists bring important characters, big scenes to life; but Shakespeare can bring the smallest characters and the tiniest scenes equally to life. And though he often seems careless and casual, just flinging one little scene after another at us, more often than not he is building up his drama, with its own world, its own atmosphere, by one wonderful little stroke after another. It is this combination of unique breadth of sympathy and intense dramatic life that makes Shakespeare the supreme master of the Theatre of any age or any nation.

But the real Elizabethan Theatre, with its packed pits, its comic breadth, its poetic grandeur, its tremendous vitality, had vanished before Shakespeare died in 1616. The old playhouses, unroofed and giving their performances only during daylight, had made way for covered theatres playing in the evening by the artificial light of candles.

Under James I there was not the same popular enthusiasm for the drama. The Puritans, rapidly increasing in numbers and influence, hated the Theatre which retaliated by burlesquing them and making the most of its threatened freedom. But the theatres closed by the Puritan Parliamen­tary Ordinance of 1642 had little of the vitality and value of the original Elizabethan Theatre.

As the drama proper declined during the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Masque claimed more and more attention. The Masque ori­ginated in renaissance Italy, and during the sixteenth century found its way first to the French, then to the English Court. It was essentially a court entertainment, designed to be what we should call now an “after-dinner show” on splendid occasions. It had no real dramatic structure. Poets wrote complimentary verses to be spoken in it, but it mostly consisted of song-and-dance scenes, which, under the two Stuart kings, were often lavishly produced, being magnificently mounted and dressed.

By encouraging scene designers and painters, the use of rich and fantas­tic costumes, the invention of stage machinery, the Masque undoubtedly made possible the later production of opera and ballet. But if we regard the Theatre as the home of truly imaginative drama, the creator of real drama­tic experience, the Masque did it more harm than good. For what it gave to the eye, what it did to satisfy the idle curiosity and wonder of its spectators, it took away from imagination.